From the oral tradition to the first novels

The Internet is the new memory of mankind and offers the chance to access works as precious as the thesis that Claude Savary - a Swiss intellectual born in 1939 and former curator of the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva - devoted in 1976 to La Pensée symbolique des Fō du Dahomey. This freely accessible document helps to grasp all the subtleties of the settlement of the future Benin, taking pains to transcribe the history of the country as transmitted by oral tradition, striving to describe its economic, religious, social and political realities. To the songs, wonderfully reproduced and translated, it is good to add the reading of the Tales of the Tammari country, published in 2003 by Karthala under the direction of Sylvain Prudhomme, French writer who, before reaching fame with his novel Par les routes (Gallimard) crowned by the Femina Prize in 2019, had striven to collect the legends of the continent that had seen him grow up. This sum - 48 tales make up the collection - invites to see the world through the eyes of the Beninese and to measure the content of their mythology in which the animal kingdom is skillfully mixed with the human kingdom. Those who prefer history to stories should read the Journal de Francesco Borghero, premier missionnaire du Dahomey, 1861-1965 (Karthala editions). It is indeed more a question here of a testimony than of an allegory, although Satan makes some furtive appearances. Finally, another account, that of Alabama Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the last slave convoy that trafficked slaves between Dahomey and America in 1859. Collected by Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), anthropologist and writer, this document, otherwise fundamental, is available in French from Lattès under the title Barracoon

. If the nineteenth century sounded - at least officially - the end of slavery, a reminder of it is made in the following century that salutes the birth of Beninese literature written in French. L'Esclave is indeed considered the first novel of the country, but it is also the first work of Felix Couchorou, born in 1900 not far from Cotonou, who published it in Paris in 1929 at the Dépêche africaine. Contrary to what the title might suggest, Couchorou does not paint the portrait of a man who is a victim of the yoke that his fellow men would put on his shoulders. On the contrary, he evokes the troubled figure of Mawoulawoè, a slave freed by Komlangan, who is going to fall in love with the wife of his son. This painting of human passions - the relationship will turn to drama and will be punctuated by many deaths - is written at a time when Benin is still under French domination, so taking sides is not obvious for the writer who sticks to a criticism of incest. In retrospect, Couchorou's work will be described as the result of a certain "assimilation" - which does not detract from his style or the flavor of his fictions. This reading will be identical for Paul Hazoumé (1890-1980) about whom the Revue d'Histoire des colonies (1938) had made an ambiguous but rather explicit judgment about his time: "if his complexion did not betray his origin, one would take him for a Frenchman, both in his person and in his writings. To tell the truth, his major work - Doguicimi, which depicts the sad fate of the eponymous character who will let herself be buried alive at the announcement of the death of Toffa, her husband, and which takes as a backdrop the former Dahomey, with well-documented descriptions of customs and rivalries - still raises debates as to the author's position vis-à-vis the colonial power. Nevertheless, it is now a classic, and it is worth mentioning that it was awarded the Prix de Littérature Coloniale in 1938 and the Prix de la Langue Française by the Académie Française the following year.

Social criticism

If the ethnological approach is intrinsically linked to Paul Hazoumé's work as a writer, it is not by chance. Anatole Coyssi (1915-1954) - the author of Quelques contes dahoméens - also associated these two axes, as did Maximilien Quénum (1911-1988) who published Trois légendes africaines à destination de la jeunesse ( Three African legends for young people) and Au Pays du Fons : us et coutumes du Dahomey (French language prize 1938). Indeed, the Beninese culture and the oral tradition serve as sources of inspiration. Without denying this invaluable contribution, his nephew - Olympe Bhêly-Quénum - will dig the breach opened by Louis Hunkanrin (1886-1964) - a militant journalist who will be exiled for ten years in Mauritania by the colonial administration following his articles and his participation in the events that took place in Porto-Novo in February 1923 (uprisings against taxes) - by devoting himself, perhaps for the first time in Benin, to social criticism. This is still tenuous and indirect in the first novel he published with Stock in 1960 and which is now available from Présence africaine. Un piège sans fin terrifies indeed more by the furious jealousy of its "heroine", but it would be vain to reduce Olympe Bhêly-Quénum to this only text. Indeed, in addition to being a complex writer encouraged by André Breton and impregnated with the existentialist model, Olympe Bhêly-Quénum, although he declares himself more realistic, even contemplative, than political, is a militant, and it is not for nothing that when the time of independence rings, the president will ask him to return to Benin after his studies in France. He was also editor-in-chief of the magazine La Vie Africaine and then founder of L'Afrique actuelle. He drew on the rich cultural material of his country for his writings, as demonstrated by Le Chant du lac (Grand Prix de Littérature d'Afrique Noire 1965) or the collection Liaison d'un été, but he also wanted to be the bard of a possible reconciliation of the two worlds he had lived with (L'Initié

, 1979). Another stage was marked when Jean Pliya (1931-2015) published Les Tresseurs de cordes, a novel that recalls real events under the guise of fiction, particularly the "Revolution" initiated by Marxist President Mathieu Kérékou at the dawn of the 1970s. Before devoting his books to religion, Jean Pliya also made a lasting impression on the literary history of his country with two plays, one satirical, La Secrétaire particulière, and the other historical, Kondo le requin, which focused on the history of Behanzin (Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique Noire in 1967). The period saw the emergence of a less committed literature - one could, for example, cite the poetry, an ode to nature, of Agbosssahessou (1911-1983), who published Les Haleines sauvages in 1971, or the writings of Eustache Prudencio (1922-2001), who preferred to adopt a certain neutrality with respect to the government in power - but some writers did not hesitate to be critical witnesses of their time, this is confirmed by Fleur du désert by Jérôme Carlos, born in Porto-Novo in 1944, which raises the delicate question of identity, a novel that cannot but resonate with the first Beninese autobiographical account by a woman's pen, Une citronnelle dans la neige (1986), in which Gisèle Hountondji, who was born in 1954 in Cotonou, returns to her painful European experience.

The contemporary era

The 1980s marked a real effervescence, and editorial production accelerated. One could think of Paulin Joachim (1931-2012) who published Oraison pour une re-naissance in 1984, of Bernabé Laye who, with Nostalgie des jours qui passent, began an international career encouraged in 1988 by Une femme dans la lumière de l'aube (Seghers Editions) and then by Mengalor with the same publisher the following year, blaise Aplogan published his first novel in 1990 (La Kola brisée), and especially Moudjib Djinadou, who was one of the first African writers to dare to evoke AIDS in Mo gbé, le cri de mauvais augure in 1991. Similarly, Florent Couao-Zotti, born in Pobé in 1964, began his literary career in 1995 in the pages of the beautiful magazine Le Serpent à Plumes and confirmed his talent by winning the African Children's Literature Prize with Un enfant dans la guerre published in 1998. Of importance, this writer is widely accessible in our latitudes, This sun where I am always thirsty is discovered for example at L'Harmattan, while Gallimard published in 2018 Western Tchoukoutou and Sarbacane offers for the youngest Le lance-pierres de Porto-Novo

. The new generation is not left behind, and the literary genres explored by Beninese authors are multiplying. Daté Atavito Barnabé-Akayi is first known for his theater, and if his first play - Amour en infraction - deals with a universal theme, the second - Les Confessions du Pr - stages an African head of state who is as deplorable in the management of his country as he is in his human relations. In his collection of short stories, L'Affaire Bissi (2011), the young author born in 1978 does not hesitate to evoke homosexuality, but it is thanks to his poetry that he has gained notoriety(Solitude mon S, Noire comme la rosée, etc..three years younger than him, Ryad Assani-Razaki published in France(La Main d'Iman, Liana Levi, 2013) and in Quebec by collaborating on a collection of erotic short stories published by the Montreal house Quebec Amérique, a daring tone that will also be the one used by Elena Miro K in Miel Sacré (Tamarin editions, 2016). As for the very young Harmonie Dodé Byll Catarya, she enters literature through slam, while her contemporary, Domingo Gilchrist, also born in 1991, prefers comics with his heroine, Houefa, daughter of Caméléon. In conclusion, and if it is necessary to demonstrate it, Beninese literature is only at its beginnings, which is confirmed by the success of the International Theater Festival inaugurated in 1991 or that of the Night of the tales launched in 2005. Finally, it also inspires intellectuals like Adrien Huannou who has devoted several reference works to it(La littérature béninoise de langue française, des origines à nos jours published by Karthala, or Doguicimi by Paul Hazoumé published by L'Harmattan).